Brugge

I died and went to heaven, and everybody there was wearing black bowler hat. Okay, so not really, but I did go see Magritte's house, which was quite fabulous. He actually used his house as inspiration and some of the items in his paintings (fireplace, windows, hats, etc.) are replicas of the items in his house. The people that ran the museum/house were ridiculously nice. I had a personalized tour that lasted for two and a half hours. (Of course, that excited me greatly.)

Brugge has lots of canals (which are not so fragrant). Once upon a time, very naked and very drunk people would splash about in these canals. One day, the good people of Brugge got tired of the nakedness and the drunkenness. They had a town meeting to decide what to do about this perplexing problem. They thought and thought, and finally came up with a completely logical solution. They should release two alligators into the water to deter the drunken debauchery. The alligators have been there for two or three years now (I think), but nobody has been maimed...yet.

I stayed in Brugge for three days on the advice of a girl in my creative writing class, which was probably a bit too long. It was a nice town, but quite full of tourists when I was there. Consequently, I felt like I was unable to get a glimpse of the city's true character.

The first day I was there, I took a gigantic five hour walk around Brugge, and I felt like I was able to take most of it in. After that, I actually wasn't in the city very much. I made one spur-of-the-moment trip to Brussels to see Magritte's house and another to see the remnants of the Western Front at Ypres. I have a much better understanding of the complete horror that was WWI after my visit to Ypres and the Flanders Field museum. In France, half of the men between 15 and 30 were dead or wounded by the end of the war. I will never be able to fathom how or why such a bloody stalemate was allowed to continue for so long.

All for now.